Shirley Grindle Runs Out of Patience With TINCUP Reform Committee

TINCUP More Than Half-Empty?Grizzled watchdog Shirley Grindle runneth out of patience with the committee responsible for reforming the county’s campaign-finance law

For a few hours nearly every month this past year, you could go to the Orange County Hall of Administration in Santa Ana, take the elevator to the third floor and watch Shirley Grindle fume.

In an over-air-conditioned conference room, a committee appointed by the Board of Supervisors has been trying to rewrite the county’s law limiting the influence of money in campaigns for office. Grindle, a 74-year-old former aeronautics engineer and one-term planning commissioner, wrote and lobbied for the passage of that law—referred to as TINCUP, short for Time Is Now, Clean Up Politics—in the late 1970s. Monitoring its enforcement has been her No. 1 pastime ever since. But, as Grindle likes to say, “I won’t be around forever.” In July 2008, supervisors appointed a committee that would update the law—partly in preparation for the day when Grindle isn’t able to serve as a watchdog.

John Gilhooley

Shirley's got your campaign finance right here

With its final meeting scheduled for early next year, that committee is approaching the end of its task. And Grindle isn’t happy with the results. “I avoid thinking as much as possible about that stupid committee because every time I think about it, I get very upset,” Grindle says. “My advice to the board would be drop the whole damn thing.”

TINCUP isn’t popular among Orange County’s elected officials and the people who help them get into office. The law caps the amount that any one donor can give to a candidate at $1,600. To many conservatives, the contribution limit is tantamount to an assault on the First Amendment. “In Sunday School, I learned it is a blessing to give,” County Supervisor Chris Norby said during a hearing on TINCUP in February 2008. “And yet the whole purpose of these restrictions on free speech and political giving make it a crime to give and a blessing to receive.”

Supervisor John Moorlach, though, wants TINCUP reformed for different reasons. Portions of the ordinance have been struck down as unconstitutional, while others don’t take into account realities of modern campaigns: the rise of the Internet, lawsuit challenges and debt financing. For her part, Grindle has been lobbying for an overhaul of the way the law is enforced. For decades, she has tracked campaign finance in the county using index cards in her Orange home—one card per donor, listing every contribution that donor has made since 1978. If anyone violates TINCUP by donating too much money to one candidate, Grindle telephones that candidate, and usually, the money is quietly returned.

The power to prosecute those who willingly break the law lies with District Attorney Tony Rackauckas. But TINCUP has never been invoked in any of that office’s criminal or civil prosecutions. Historically, the DA’s office has declined to prosecute campaign-finance compliants due to lack of evidence or, in some cases, referred them to the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission—which will punish violations of state laws but not local ones such as TINCUP. Grindle points to those facts as evidence that Rackauckas is unwilling to enforce the ordinance.

The DA’s office disputes such characterizations, saying that none of the complaints filed over the years warranted prosecution. “Shirley Grindle and her nine cats don’t know what [TINCUP] says,” declares DA’s office spokeswoman Susan Kang Schroeder. “If Shirley or anyone in this world would file a complaint, and if there’s evidence to support it, there’s going to be a criminal filing.”

To take the burden of monitoring the law off Grindle and the DA, Moorlach proposed in February 2008 the establishment of an unelected, apolitical commission that would monitor and prosecute TINCUP violators. The Board of Supervisors, though, rejected that idea by a 3-2 vote. Three months later, the grand jury urged them to reconsider. In response, Moorlach proposed the creation of an ad-hoc committee, which would be staffed with two appointees per supervisor. “I was hoping to clean up the ordinance and make it a little more user-friendly,” he says. “Let’s put together a team, and let’s hammer this out.”

From the beginning, Grindle thought the committee was a “stacked deck.” Among its members are prominent county Republican campaign consultants John Lewis and Adam Probolsky, as well as Phil Greer, the go-to elections attorney for many in the GOP establishment. All three make money from campaigns; it stands to reason, Grindle says, they would profit from a loosening of TINCUP’s restrictions on campaign fund-raising. The presence of supervisorial staffers on the committee also worried Grindle: Three of the supervisors have already voted against an update to TINCUP, and it’s unlikely, she says, their aides would vote differently.

Lewis laughs off accusations of a conflict-of-interest. “You could exclude all campaign consultants, all campaign treasurers, anybody who has a professional involvement in a political campaign,” he says. “But then you’d have a really poor understanding of the practicalities of everything you’re trying to do.”